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Monday, February 03, 2014

`The Slave of a Timorous Delusion'

Michael
Dirda introduces us, belatedly in my case, to Lane Cooper (1875-1959), a
longtime professor of English at Cornell University:

“In those
days it still seemed obvious that the Homeric poems, the tragedies of
Sophocles, the dialogues of Plato, and the Old and New Testament should stand
at the center of an educated person’s interior life. Cooper blamed their
neglect on the elective system, the notion that `one subject is just about as
good as another.’ As he complained, `the main principle in a general education
no longer is ‘Let a man deny himself, and take up his cross daily,’ but ‘let
every man follow his bent.’”

Clearly a
reactionary as justifiably extinct as the diplodocus. My university library has
twenty of Cooper’s titles in its collection, including concordances to the works
of Horace, Milton and Wordsworth, three titles devoted to Aristotle, The Power of the Eye in Coleridge (1910)
and Experiments in Education (1943). What
pleases me most is Dirda’s mention of Cooper’s 1909 pamphlet “Literature for Engineers,” subtitled “An address delivered before the college of civil and
mechanical engineering.” Some years ago I worked as a writer for an engineering
school in upstate New York. While interviewing a professor of electrical
engineering, I mentioned Rudyard Kipling’s great story, “Wireless,” from 1902
(Guy Davenport: “Trust Kipling to have seen in wireless telegraphy the art of
Keats.” – Objects on a Table, 1998).
The professor’s face remained blank. He didn’t know the story, which is hardly
surprising, but also had never heard of Kipling. That was my introduction to
the great divide in learning even among the well-educated.

At the
engineering school where I now work as a science writer, I usually keep
literature under wraps. I know one Russian-born professor who swears allegiance
to Chekhov, and a computational mathematician with whom I’ve talked about
Browning. Otherwise, I keep my bookish tastes to myself. To quote a passage by Cooper like the
following to engineering students or faculty would amount to a self-indulgent
posturing. It would accomplish nothing except to inflate my sense of self-importance:

“The best
literature, and by that is meant the best poetry, generates in us a power or
pleasure that is not servile, a pleasure that only a free man can fully enjoy.
The man that does not enjoy good poetry is not free; and the man that is afraid
of it is the slave of a timorous delusion, afraid of power that he affects to despise.”Dirda
judges Cooper’s “most charming” book to be Louis Agassiz as a Teacher (1917), a collection of memoirs by
the great Swiss-born professor’s former students at Harvard. Naturally, I thought of Guy
Davenport’s first book, The Intelligence
of Louis Agassiz (1963), a selection from the naturalist’s voluminous
writings. In his introduction, later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), Davenport expresses
thoughts Cooper might sadly have acceded to:

“Louis Agassiz assumed that the structure of
the natural world was everyone’s interest, that every community as a matter of
course would collect and classify its zoology and botany. College students can
now scarcely make their way through a poem organized around natural facts. Ignorance
of natural history has become an aesthetic problem in reading the arts.”